That coming Biggish One — a magnitude-7 quake — is 100 times bigger than that coming Mediumish One, a 5.

That’s because each whole number on the scale marks a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude.

But like me, you knew that, right, because we’re old vets of Earthquake Country? I’m just guessing, though, that like me, you conveniently forget the fact in between being reminded of it, because it’s what we do in order to get out of bed each morning. We can’t go around worrying every minute about when the ground is going to start moving under our feet in horrendous fashion, because that way neurosis lies.

It’s so unlike the way it is for folks who live in other regions prone to natural disaster. Hurricanes are all over the Weather Channel. Tornadoes begin not out of the blue but in a system that creates the whirlwinds, and if their exact path cannot be accurately predicted beforehand, there is definitely a thing called Twister Weather.

Whereas, and you know this, there is not a thing called Earthquake Weather, even if we sometimes like to think there is — a little unseasonably warm, the Earth’s crust getting a little baked and kaboom! We know this is an Old San Andreas Wives’ tale, or we know it when we are reminded of it by the seismologists among us.

A group of those seismologists gathered a bunch of reporters and editors together last week at Caltech for the Earthquakes 101 Media Summit. With the 20th anniversary of the Northridge Earthquake upon us on Jan. 17, it was high time to gather the troops who will be telling the world about the way it is here in Southern California when the next one hits. We need to get it right when it does, as it will.

Then there’s this: “It’s not the magnitude of the earthquake that affects you; it’s the shaking of the ground you’re on,” said Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC. “Soft soils shake more than hard rock.” So know your ground.

We’re not going to prevent the next Big One. And, no, as KNBC’s Conan Nolan, who told some war stories from his long experience covering quakes told the group, that paranoid question that always comes up in a post-quake press conference — “Didn’t you scientists actually know it was coming, and you didn’t want to scare us?” — is not the case. But other places, primarily Japan but also Mexico, have invested in earthquake warning systems that can alert us when a quake has happened and give residents at least a hint that it’s coming, as well as stop fast-moving trains up to a minute before the shock waves get to Los Angeles from a desert fault, for instance. California even has a recently passed law authored by state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, requiring that a better early-warning system be put in place. But the estimated $80 million in funding for the system hasn’t been identified — and it would be a small price to pay to dramatically increase our safety. Not that it would prevent property damage. But it would allow us time to get to a relatively safe place.

Caltech’s Egill Hauksson told reporters that since the Northridge quake, 20 years of state budget problems have actually seen improvements in emergency response investment “dismantled and discontinued” because of spending cuts. “We’re still throwing the dice on that one,” he said. We do have more sensors and bigger computers to track the meta-data that will help us analyze the next quake. But spending and interest “tend to decrease the farther we get away from” a killer temblor. As another seismologist told him, “You’re only as good as your last earthquake.”

Can’t we instead use our memories of how bad it was last time to get it together before the next one comes?

Larry Wilson is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board. larry.wilson@langnews.com

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.

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